Everything Bad Is Good for You (Essay)

The Innovation of Educational ToolsPlaying video games and watching TV shows are beneficial types of popular culture. Conventional wisdom would argue that new media is a bad influence and that the only way to be intelligent is by reading. In the book Everything Bad is Good For You, author Steven Johnson, argues that even though our popular culture seems to get dumber, it is actually getting smarter. Johnson proves his arguments by comparing and explaining the benefits of the complexity of modern video games, television shows, and movies that require active participation and critical thinking in order for players and viewers to understand what is going on. Modern popular culture requires a lot of mental work, active engagement and problem solving. Rather than being the mindless, mind-numbing time-wasters as conventional wisdom believe, these activities strengthen problem-solving, reasoning abilities and skills that can help people in their daily lives and professions. In addition, Johnson explains that the reason why popular culture is becoming harder is because our brain likes to be challenged and the entertainment industry makes a profit by creating complicated video games, TV shows and new technology because that is what people want. As a result, new media should be approached as a new tool that helps society to become more analytically prepared for real life situations.

According to Johnson, popular culture improves the way young people think. Video games for example require that players improve their skills and master certain levels before moving to the next one. Popular culture critics judge video games by its content, not by the way it is played, which challenge the players to solve problems. Although the old fashioned entertainment of reading has a lot of rewards, so do video games. For example, Johnson at one point points out that, “the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less” (9). Our culture is getting more complex; therefore, we are getting smarter in mastering it and video games are part of that reason. Johnson says that people get smart because video games are not just about eye and hand coordination; video games require thinking: “when you put the game down and move back to the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problem you’ve been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth” (25 - 26). Games are clearly not just shooting something down; it requires strategies, it is challenging, it is frustrating and not always fun. Gaming improves the way people think because even after playing the game, players continue formulating ideas in their brain on how to overcome challenges they face in video games. As a result, video games are not “dumbing people down;” it makes players “think outside the box” in order to understand its complexity and overcome obstacles. Video games are popular, not because of their flashy graphics, but because of the way it inspires players to think and seek out rewards and explore environments. Johnson describes how video game players have to work mentally while playing in order to progress in a game: “…the mental labor of managing all these simultaneous objectives [is] ‘telescoping’… this skill lies in focusing on immediate problems while still maintaining a long-distance view. You can’t progress far in a game if you simply deal with the puzzles you stumble across; you have to coordinate them with the ultimate objectives on the horizon” (54). In order for a player to beat the game, the player must organize short and long term objectives psychologically while playing the game. It shows that playing video games requires critical thinking to prioritize objectives and be successful. Conventional wisdom believe that playing video games does not require thinking. However, playing video games clearly requires a more complex type of thinking than reading books because the player has to act in the moment, while planning his/her next move....

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...You hear throughout developed culture that popular media has a tendency to “dumb”
down societies. Whether you believe this idea is solely based on your discretion, but there is one
man who took the time to analyze this collective supposition deeply. Steven Johnson and his
written work EverythingBad Is Good For You looked at the effects from popular media from an
alternative perspective. Looking past the arguments of morality, Johnson calls attention to the
progressive complexity in cultures seen in the past thirty years through elements such as video
games, television, and film. He states the significance of participating in such medias is not so
much changing what we think about, but how cognitive facilities are being exercised. As a result
of such complex engagements, people are becoming smarter or at least better thinkers.
This hypothesis, which formulated back in 2005, is referred to as The Sleeper Curve.
Though he states the increased demand of complex skills is shown through multiple medias, we
will be looking specifically on how this curve is measured in television. By comparing themes of
The Sleeper Curve and prior shows, we will see how the American television drama Sons of
Anarchy exemplifies this developed complexity in television programming. After analyzing the
drama, one can see the show’s success of acquiring complexity by it use of multiple threads, fillins,...

...Final Paper
Xbox and MTV Improving My Life Hours on End
The world of pop culture will never be the same. Visionary writer Steven Johnson proves this to be true in his work EverythingBad is Good for You. Possibly the best thing about this book is how upfront Johnson is with his message. His aims at convincing his audience of a simple yet novel idea: popular culture has become more complex and mentally stimulating over the past thirty years. One of Johnson’s greatest strengths in his writing is how often he circulates to that point, making it certain his point shines throughout the book. Johnson is treading thin ice with his statements about the “dumbed down” television and video games. The common immediate thought with American pop culture resembles an overweight adolescent staring at a television drooling with one hand on the remote and the other in his nose. Johnson intends to completely erase that misconception. As he puts it, “the popular media steadily, but almost imperceptibly, making our minds sharper, as we soak in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff.” (Johnson xiii) The intelligence of Johnson is polished through his evidence to said fact.
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...In EverythingBad Is Good For You, Steven Johnson uses many scientific methods and presents point of view stating that popular culture does not only have negative impacts on us. In the introduction of the television section, he briefly tells us the truth that the complexity of modern TV shows is rising and it also makes people more intelligent. To support his ideas, Johnson divides the content into three parts: Multiple threading, Flashing Arrows, and Social Networks.
Multiple threading is very common in modern television shows but not in past shows. Johnson uses four graphs which clearly show the amount of plot content in relation to the running time of four episodes from different shows, to depict changes of complexity in TV dramas. In one drama, Dragnet, the narrative only focuses on one plotline; a few years later, the numbers of plotline have been increased in another drama called The Sopranos. The evidence strongly supports Johnson’s statement: Multiple threading becomes more complex and abundant in modern television dramas. However, it is not the only reason that makes TV shows more complicated.
Flashing Arrows, which had allowed viewers to follow the plot more easily television shows of the past, disappeared and were transformed in modern soap dramas and sitcoms. TV shows stopped using flashing arrows because audiences have been learned to find the hidden answers in the shows for many years. In soap...

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...Breaking Bad
Television shows are being seen as more intelligent compared to how it used to be. This is shown particularly in the hit AMC series “Breaking Bad” staring Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. This show is about how Bryan Cranston’s character, high school chemistry teacher Walter White, has been stricken with terminal lung cancer and has decided to take on the life of teaching himself how to cook meth in order to provide financially for his family after his cancer has won. He teams up with a former high school student of his Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul, and they create the best meth concoction ever seen by addicts and drug dealers in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is the perfect way for Walter to easily provide for his family when he is gone especially with a housewife expecting a baby, a son with cerebral palsy, living on a teacher salary. This show suggests the theme of how far in terms of desperation someone will go to provide for his or her family and how pride can be the motivation. One scene in particular shows the importance of the family’s desperation and Walter’s pride by how the setting, dialogue, wardrobe is put together to construct the scene. Many of these components can be compared to the findings of popular culture in television that is explained in our text “EverythingBad is Good for You”, by Steven Johnson. This scene is important because it shows...

...best seller EverythingBad Is Good For You. Johnson uses tables and graphs, as well as the use of multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networking to show the reader the difference in viewing a show from the 80’s (such as Starsky and Hutch or Dragnet) and comparing them to shows from todays popular culture (like The Sopranos and Hill Street Blues). While the content might not always be educational or motivational the framework of the programming has become more complex when broken down into concepts such as Multiple Threading, Flashing Arrows, and Social Networking.
How many different scenarios pop up in a typical episode of Starsky and Hutch? Johnson uses a thread in the subplot as a form of structural measurement when charting multiple threads in episodes. Starsky and Hutch, for example, has few threads being that the show will jump between perspectives of the cops and the criminals, the show will start and end entirely within the 30 minute episode. There is no overlapping of threads nor is there multiple threads to remember. When compared to Hill Street Blues, not only does the number of primary characters increase enough to be recognizable but the episodes use threads (or events) that overlap each other from previous episodes. While multiple threading has been increasing in popular culture the dramatic decreasing of what Johnson likes to refer to as “flashing arrows” can also be used to measure...

...Tramell, a brilliant, bisexual, alleged serial killer, in Basic Instinct (1992).[3] Several actresses at the time turned down the role, mostly because of the nudity required.[8] In the film's most notorious scene, Tramell is being questioned by the police, and she crosses and uncrosses her legs, exposing her genitalia, which are not covered by underwear.[9] According to Stone, she agreed to film the flashing scene with no underwear, and although she and Verhoeven had discussed the scene from the beginning of production, she was unaware just how explicit the infamous shot would be:[10]
"I knew that we were going to do this leg-crossing thing and I knew that we were going to allude to the concept that I was nude, but I did not think that you would see my vagina in the scene. Later, when I saw it in the screening I was shocked. I think seeing it in a room full of strangers was so disrespectful and so shocking, so I went into the booth and slapped him and left."[11][12]
Stone claimed in an earlier interview, however, that "it was so fun" watching the film for the first time with strangers.[10] Verhoeven has denied all claims of trickery and said, "As much as I love her, I hate her, too, especially after the lies she told the press about the shot between her legs, which was a straight lie".[13] Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who later befriended the actress, also claimed in his memoir, Hollywood Animal, that the actress was fully aware of the level of nudity...